I'm trying to get the list of issues on a private repository using bitbucket's API.

I have confirmed that HTTP Basic authentication works with hurl, but I am unable to authenticate in Python. Adapting the code from this tutorial, I have written the following script.

import cookielib
import urllib2

class API():
    api_url = 'http://api.bitbucket.org/1.0/'

    def __init__(self, username, password):
        self._opener = self._create_opener(username, password)

    def _create_opener(self, username, password):
        cj = cookielib.LWPCookieJar()
        cookie_handler = urllib2.HTTPCookieProcessor(cj)
        password_manager = urllib2.HTTPPasswordMgrWithDefaultRealm()
        password_manager.add_password(None, self.api_url, username, password)
        auth_handler = urllib2.HTTPBasicAuthHandler(password_manager)
        opener = urllib2.build_opener(cookie_handler, auth_handler)
        return opener

    def get_issues(self, username, repository):
        query_url = self.api_url + 'repositories/%s/%s/issues/' % (username, repository)
        try:
            handler = self._opener.open(query_url)
        except urllib2.HTTPError, e:
            print e.headers
            raise e
        return handler.read()

api = API(username='my_username', password='XXXXXXXX')

api.get_issues('my_username', 'my_repository') results in:

>>> 
Server: nginx/0.7.62
Date: Mon, 19 Apr 2010 16:15:06 GMT
Content-Type: text/plain
Connection: close
Vary: Authorization,Cookie
Content-Length: 9

Traceback (most recent call last):
  File "C:/USERS/personal/bitbucket-burndown/bitbucket-api.py", line 29, in <module>
    print api.get_issues('my_username', 'my_repository')
  File "C:/USERS/personal/bitbucket-burndown/bitbucket-api.py", line 25, in get_issues
    raise e
HTTPError: HTTP Error 401: UNAUTHORIZED

api.get_issues('jespern', 'bitbucket') works like a charm.

What's wrong with my code?